“I legitimately feared for my life.” So said a freshman at Emory University after several chalk messages appeared around campus, airing slogans such as “Vote for Trump,” “Trump for Pres” and the ominously-worded “Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016.” At first glance, this student’s response and the campus protests that ensued after the chalking seem to validate the perception that political correctness on college campuses has run amok. Indeed, our editorial board has even weighed in, declaring the student response at Emory an overreaction. They undoubtedly have a point. However, there is an under-explored component of these protests concerning the role of private property at Emory, prompting me to make a limited defense of these protesters.
I am certainly no apologist for campus political correctness. After protests at Yale, Missouri and elsewhere earlier this school year, I penned an op-ed lambasting the speech-suppressing tendencies of campus activists. However, the characteristics of protests at Emory are different than at Yale or Missouri. Emory students are currently responding to what may very well be an act of intimidation and vandalism — not simply the innocuous behavior of faculty members and student journalists.
A recent piece at the libertarian site Reason notes that Emory is a private institution that can set whatever regulations on campus chalking it wants. According to The Emory Wheel, chalking zones must be approved through the university, and students may only chalk on ground surfaces. However, pictures of Emory’s campus indicate whoever wrote these messages violated this policy. Moreover, Georgia has already held its primary, so any benefit gained from writing Trump slogans on the university’s asphalt seems negligible. From these two facts, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Trump messages were not simply innocuous political advertisements by well-meaning Trump supporters. Rather, they were acts of trespass likely carried out for some other reason than swaying public opinion. Perhaps this is why libertarian writer Jeffrey Tucker, who actually was present at Emory at the time the chalk appeared, concluded the pro-Trump scrawling “absolutely intended to intimidate everyone and it worked.”
This is an important point to bear in mind when mocking the hysterical-sounding responses of Emory students. Emory has a significant minority student population, and the Trump scribbling (which serves no real political purpose at the moment in Georgia) can send a racially prejudiced message to students in a way the name of other presidential candidates could not. Because this message violated private property, it seems more fair to judge the situation as a matter of vandalism and possible intimidation than free speech. I may be giving the protesters too much credit here, but the issue isn’t whether students have a right to advertise whichever candidate they want — they unquestionably do. The larger issue is these Trump sloganeers resorted to vandalism rather than the proper channels of chalking at Emory, sending a perceivably predatory message to which the Emory faculty did not immediately respond.
With that said, I find it unlikely the culprits behind the Trump slogans are malicious villains carrying out “an act of violence,” as one Emory student suggested. On the contrary, it seems obvious to me that the pro-Trump chalking was a prank designed to incite exactly the kind of reaction on campus we are currently witnessing. I’m shocked no one (yet) has painted “Make America Great Again” on Beta Bridge just to see if students here react in a similarly hysterical fashion. Any conceivably good case the protesters could have pursued against the university has now been squandered by their excessive hyperbole. Violating private property to send an intimidatory message is a legitimate cause for concern, but to then argue the action of these trespassers — which merely repeated the slogan of a presidential candidate — is tantamount to “having a KKK rally on campus,” or painting swastikas on a Jewish fraternity, only serves to discredit the protesters’ case. These over-the-top responses only make me more likely to believe the now widespread mockery of these students is well-deserved.
Perhaps this is simply a naive attempt on my part to capture the nuance in an already-established narrative of special snowflakes on campus, but I think understanding the origin of this issue is important. The original Trump chalking was not as innocuous as many of the media outlets currently mocking the Emory students present. It violated private property, likely intending to provoke a reaction, and we should factor this into our judgment of the situation. However, the subsequent student response at Emory has made it difficult to sympathize with the protesters, who appear more interested in being protected from the very existence of Donald Trump than expressing their displeasure with Emory for not immediately responding to a possible act of intimidation. As impartial observers of this spectacle, we should acknowledge the legitimate concern the original chalking may have caused, but I don’t see the need to defend the protesters any further.
Matt Winesett is a Senior Associate Editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at m.winesett@cavalierdaily.com.
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